Wikevent

Featured Events

Wikevent is a project to create a worldwide, Free (as in “free speech”) compendium of public events like concerts, lectures, parties, classes, sporting events, and every other sort of event which you can think of. Please jump in and start editing.

Why Wikevent?

The problem

There are lots and lots of events sites on the internet. They all seem to have one thing in common: not enough events data. We’re trying to solve that problem. The idea is that venues, artists, speakers, clubs, etc. want to spread their event information as far as possible but they only really want to enter the data once, usually that means on their own website.

Meanwhile sites like Eventful, Upcoming, and now Last.fm should all have access to this event data so that they can compete or cooperate as they choose on the cool stuff like user participation or wishlists or whatever.

The solution

So we hear lots and lots of talk about the semantic web, but what is it really? What it is is a way to make sure that data you put on the web can be reused with minimum hassle by other sites. Event information is exactly the sort of data that people want to share with as many other sites and publications as possible. At Wikevent our events are marked up with microformats as well as being published in RDF format. This makes the data very easy to reuse.

The license

It wouldn’t be very useful to solve the technical problem of how to grab event data if we were to then try to hoard it all away for ourselves, now would it? That’s why we allow re-use and redistribution of our data under the most permissive of Creative Commons licenses: the CC Attribution license. This means that you can reproduce data found here anywhere, for any reason. You can even use our data to make money, in fact that’s what we want you to do.

What Wikevent can do for you

Add a calendar to your website

It’s easy to transform the HTML you find on Wikevent into a calendar page for your website, perfectly marked up with microformats. If you need help we’ll show you how! You decide if you want to link back to Wikevent or not. If you’ve entered the event info yourself then there’s not even a need for attribution.

Add a calendar to your clients’ websites

If you’re a web developer you can use Wikevent as the calendaring engine for your clients’ sites. You get the benefit of all the work we do to make entering events easy, and of our semantic web markup. The microformat markup that we use for individual events makes it easy to adjust the look and feel of our calendars to match your client’s site.

Enter your events once, see them everywhere

Wikevent is designed to spread your event info far and wide. – Both the software and the license are geared to do this for you, all you have to do is put your event info here, and it should automatically be picked up by sites like Technorati, Eventful, and Upcoming.

Wikevent aims to make it as easy and quick as possible for you to enter information about where and when events you know about will take place. We will accept information under the Creative Commons-by 2.5 open content license or which is in the public domain, and will make that information available here, as well as by data feed to any online events calendar which cares to use it.

The community is your helping hand

Wikevent is Open Content and Open Source – We use Free and Open source software as our platform, and license our content with a Free Creative Commons license that says anyone can use the data so long as they say where they got it. This means that your event can and will be copied all over the internet, and in print magazines and newspapers.

Leverage the community – Wikevent users can help you keep your events up-to-date, and add extra information like maps and photos.

If this strikes you as an interesting idea please read our goals and non-goals, find something interesting to do on the TODO list, and plunge forward. For a list of current policies see Wikevent:Namespace index.